Hermitage Museum to Open a Contemporary Outpost in Moscow

Image

A model of the the State Hermitage Museum’s planned Moscow branch.CreditCreditHani Rashid and Lise Anne Couture/Asymptote Architecture

By Joseph Giovannini

July 16, 2015

Add the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia, to a growing list of museums, including the Guggenheim and the Louvre, that are launching new satellites from the mother ship. Late last month, during 250th-anniversary celebrations of the Hermitage’s founding by Catherine the Great, the New York architects Hani Rashid and Lise Anne Couture of Asymptote Architecture signed a contract to design the Hermitage Modern Contemporary, an outpost in Moscow that will draw on the Hermitage’s rich 20th-century art collections and also display new work. With the Garage, by Rem Koolhaas, which opened a month ago, and other new contemporary museums popping up, Moscow is signaling an ambition to become a New York-style art powerhouse.

The 140,000-square-foot, 15-story Hermitage satellite, with a shrink-wrapped digital skin enclosing a porous, terraced interior, will be part of a mixed-use district developed on the grounds of the former ZiL auto plant, which manufactured limousines for Soviet leaders. The LSR Group, a Moscow developer, will build a structure for Hermitage 20/21, a department of the museum that has organized contemporary exhibitions since 2007. “Rather than being perceived as a museum dealing only with the past, the Hermitage is pushing itself forward into the future from its powerful historical position,” Mr. Rashid said. “Our whole generation of architects looked to the Russian avant-garde of the early 20th century, which made such a powerful break to the past. We’re working within a tradition that we’re extending.”

Long in the vanguard of digital design, he and Ms. Couture designed and built a navigable, interactive Guggenheim online in 2000, perhaps the first serious attempt at a virtual building, and have applied virtuality to real projects, as with a wraparound digital environment off the trading floor of the New York Stock Exchange and a futuristic undulating glass carapace stretching like nylon around the Yas Viceroy hotel in Abu Dhabi. “With so much museum work over the years, we’ve dress-rehearsed for the Hermitage,” Mr. Rashid said. “We’ve done a lot of thinking about how art might be seen in the future, about how the museum building itself can provoke artistic responses.”

Correction:

Because of an editing error, a picture caption on Friday with a report in the Inside Art column about plans for a Moscow branch of the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia, described the image incorrectly. It shows a model of the planned branch, not a rendering.